These Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket earphones may well give you what you’re after if you are tired of plain old black and white earphones. The buds themselves are usually the only part of your portable music setup that’s on show so they might as well look interesting, right? Well, check out whether these buds offer style over substance in our Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket review.
As their name suggests, the Skullcandy Full Metal Jackets look like they’re made of shiny metal. Once you actually get your hands on them, their lack of weight will tell you that’s it’s just a metallic smear over the top of the bud, but at least that makes them comfortable to wear.
We found the included rubber tips a little hard to get a decent seal in your ear with – essential for any IEM earphone – but there are also two pairs of excellent Comply foam buds included with these Full Metal Jacket earphones too.
Get them lodged into your ear cavity and start the tunes a pumping and you’ll notice one thing: bass. This is no surprise given their name screams ‘I’m hardcore’ at the top of its 11mm lungs, but the extent to which the low-end dominates the Skullcandy Full Metal Jackets is unusual and, unfortunately, a real mis-step.
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There may be lots of bass to these Skullcandy Full Metal Jackets, but there’s little of anything else. This leaves all types of music sounding oddly muffled, which is especially noticeable if there are vocals involved. At times it almost sounds like you’re listening to a party going on next door, one you’re not invited to.
The levels of bass can be enjoyable if you’re listening to music that’s purely electronic, but we’d still prefer to listen to it on rival Denons or Sennheisers. The Skullcandy Full Metal Jackets’ real problem is that the idea that they’re the most extreme earphones around only plays out in their looks and name. You can get bass just as powerful elsewhere for the same price, paired with much more detail and better overall sound quality.
If you really fall in love with the Skullcandy Full Metal Jacket earphones’ aesthetics, your ears will get used to their deficiencies after a while – just as with any pair of earphones. With a £50 RRP though, you can get much better sound quality for your cash.
